Media bias revealed in JournoList e-mails

I suspect this unveiling will reverberate for a while. I certainly hope it holds through the November elections.

The Daily Caller offers a little investigative reporting on certain media outlets covering the last presidential election. One of the e-mails revealed shows a plan to deflect Jeremiah Wright’s damage to their favorite candidate.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

The link is quite an interesting story. For me it offers nothing new, however, because I’ve assumed for some time that was the way it is in the MSM. I suspect much of the anger here is because the ‘tough’ questions came from their own. And the softball or no-ball reporting continues into Obama’s second year in office. Just last week on CBS News, Bob Schieffer, in an interview with AG Eric Holder, never even asked him a question about the Justice Department not criminally prosecuting the Black Panthers’ who were intiminating voters in Philadelphia.

I categorize the MSM the same as the black vote–always–no matter what– in the Democratic camp. That way I have no expectation of either in their voting or reporting.